Have You Turbo-Charged Your Training With These Teaching/Learning Strategies?

Training and development (T&D) are really two sides of a single coin:

• Training can be defined as preparing someone’s skills to perform specific tasks.

• Development is concerned with empowering people who have the readiness to deal not only with present needs but also those of the unknown future. Stephen Covey calls this “sharpening the saw” to be ready for whatever comes.

Training and development are natural processes. In many ways, the evolutionary process and T&D are the same. Evolution is a process by which an organism changes its behavior or form in order to better compete with other organisms or to adapt to a changing environment.

Evolution is the unfolding of potential. Nothing can unfold if it has no potential. Therefore, in a metaphorical sense, evolution can be described as a process of remembering potentials which have been forgotten or which may have not been needed previously.

T&D works the same way. Through the awakening of new knowledge, novel perspectives, untapped capacities, hidden skills, and different ways of knowing, potentials which have been latent prior to this awakening process are now activated. Once this has occurred, one’s perception of everything is different because seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling–in short living itself– is happening on many more levels than before this awakening.

Obviously what I have just described is the ideal T & D experience. How often does this really happen in training sessions you conduct, meetings you lead, or presentations you give?

How often, instead do you prepare and prepare; you make what you felt was a brilliant presentation, only to have the participants leave grumbling about what a waste of time it was? How often do you knock yourself out to make a presentation interesting but as you look out at the participants you can tell their minds are off somewhere else?

Whether you are talking about traditional business training or "field training", the issues I've mentioned above present themselves. Of course the traditional training situation is often in a classroom, a conference call, a webinar, or an online course in which one is participating. The field training situation is what we often call "on-the-job" training or training in a "real world" setting. Field training tends to me more hands-on.

The good news I bring you in this report is that the awakening I described earlier can happen one hundred percent of the time IF the training session, meeting, or presentation is structured properly to take into account all the we know about how the human brain learns and processes information. And this applies equally to both traditional and field training!

A Multi-modal Approach to Training

What does multi-modal learning mean? In a nutshell it means learning something in wide variety of ways. The scientific research behind multi-modal learning has documented that:
• The more different ways a person learns something, the more they will really learn it.
• The more different ways they learn something, the more they will remember it.
• The more different ways they learn something, the more they will genuinely understand and assimilate itIn most of your formal education you basically learned required information in two or three ways at best—the traditional “reading, writing, ’rithmetic” ways of learning which were are at the heart of most of the learning we did in school.

However, not everyone learns and processes information best in the traditional ways. Most people need to learn and process information several different ways for the information to really stick. In multi-modal approaches to learning people discover how to learn anything more quickly. They discover how to remember forever what they’ve learned. And they learn how to apply the information they get to their personal and professional lives.

When you’re involved in communicating with others, you’ll be surprised at how much better they’ll understand what you’re teaching when you structure your training session to access a wider range of their learning and knowing capacities. The key to doing this is to structure your training around the eight multiple intelligences.

Let me introduce you to a tool that will forever change any training you’ll ever do, whether it’s a formal training workshop, the more informal training which occurs daily on-the-job, leading meetings or discussions, making a presentation, or any time you’re involved in situations where you’re needing to communicate with others.

It’s a revolutionary training tool called the Multiple Intelligence SmartStrategies™. The SmartStrategies™ provide all of the strategies, techniques, methods, and tools you will ever need to put together dynamite training sessions, meetings, or presentations in which people will learn the material you’re teaching better than you ever thought possible, and they’ll have fun in the process!

Multiple Intelligences (a.k.a. The Eight Kinds of Smart) is simply a model for understanding at least eight different ways people learn, understand, and process information. The following diagram shows the eight:


Here's is a a sample of three teaching and learning strategies for each intelligence which you can incorporate into your teaching.

ImageSmart Strategies
• Create diagrams or pictures of the information.
• Visualize how to use the learning in your life.
• Mind map the information

LogicSmart Strategies
• Make graphs of related facts and figures.
• Pass out an outline of the key points and subpoints.
• Use different thinking patterns to analyze the information.

BodySmart Strategies
• Role play or act out concepts of the learning.
• Turn the information into a physical game.
• Watch an expert and copy what they do until you master the skill.

NatureSmart Strategies
• Find equivalents for your information in the natural world.
• Examine environmental issues that connect to the topic.
• Incorporate natural objects into your presentation.

SoundSmart Strategies
• Make up a song about the information.
• Think of background sounds you associate with the learning.
• Use different ways of speaking to explain the information (loud, soft, fast, slow).

WordSmart Strategies
• Turn the information into a limerick or a poem.
• Write it up as a front-page newspaper story.
• Make up riddles, jokes, or puns based on the information you’re learning.

PeopleSmart Strategies
• Interview experts in the area you’re studying.
• Explain your learning to a group of friends.
• Learn with others, with each person learning a part then teaching it.

SelfSmart Strategies
• List personal implications of the knowledge for you.
• List 10 ways to use what you’re learning right now.
• Think about the spiritual or universal implications of what you’re learning.

What so often happens in learning is that people learn something only in the space between their ears and above the neck. How long does it usually last? In my experience, sometimes as soon as thirty minutes after the training session, people have forgotten most of the information.

However, when you employ multi-modal teaching and learning strategies, the learning takes place throughout the entire brain-mind-body system and beyond, in the social environment as well.

If you want to reach everyone, everytime, and know that people will leave your training having genuinely understood your information, you’ve got to present it in a variety of ways to appeal to the different intelligences. And I promise you, the Eight Kinds of Smart are already present in any group you train or to whom you make a presentation!